Comments:

This means we can trigger earthquakes! So we just need to trigger them all up and down major fault lines until we’ve released all the stress in the Earth’s crust and settle down to frequent, small quakes instead of rare, devastating ones.

Though I’d prefer to do that with geothermal power rather than fracking. Might as well get carbon-free energy.

I'm guessing this may only work in areas with many small faults rather than massive ones like in SoCal, but I could easily be wrong. The practical potential of this is very cool indeed, and the pulpy story potential of evil energy company moguls building earthquake machines is awesome.

“We defeated the evil carbon-spewing, water table-poisoning energy company! Why are the earthquakes continuing at a lesser rate?” *investigation ensues* “The green-power geothermal company that has been lobbying to raise the standards for building codes to withstand small quakes is behind it!”

Not really, the entire developed world is at or below (mostly below, and in some nations well below) replacement. The US population is only continuing to grow because of immigration into the US. Population growth in the developing world is slowing, in many nations quite rapidly. In general, the only nations that have a high population growth are the few remaining hellholes (ie much of sub-saharan Africa, and a handful of non-African nations like Pakistan). Here's the 2011 annual population growth rate (as a %) for the nations of the planet. It's been falling every decade, and sometime in the next 50-90 years the world population should start to decline simply because the worldwide birthrate has gotten sufficiently low.

The more serious problem is the reason for this is more of the world is developing, which is wonderful - poverty and famine are considerably rarer than they were 20 years ago, but that requires energy. What we need is even more investment in solar, nuclear, and various other sustainable types of energy that don't produce greenhouse gases.